Help a Reporter Out is an online service set up for journalists to quickly gather feedback from the public

Public

In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science,...

. It is designed to enable journalists to connect with people who have expertise or experience in particular issues, so that the journalists can obtain valuable advice and quotes for articles they are writing. It was founded as a Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 group in 2008 by Peter Shankman, and was later turned into a mailing list claiming over 100'000 members. In June 2010, HARO was acquired by Vocus, Inc

Vocus

Vocus is a publicly held company that provides on-demand software for public relations, marketing and communications professionals. Their software provides news monitoring and management, social media monitoring and management, press release distribution and reporting and analytics, and includes...

.

Five Rules of HARO

1. You receive three emails on a daily basis, with queries from reporters and outlets all over the globe. Reply if you are well-informed about any of the topics and answer directly
2. Never Spam reporters with off-topic proposals in response to their questions
3. Never post the queries on blog or anywhere online, even though you can forward them to your friends
4. Never reproduce the reporter email addresses in HARO emails for any cause
5. Follow code of conduct by being good to each other

These rules are a must if one plans to be a part of HARO.